Ryan Avery

Though I never claim to be a master when it comes to editing audio, I do know enough to be able to solve most day-to-day problems.

Recently, I was asked to create a shorter mix of a song for a dance troupe performance. They were using Down Home Girl by Old Crow Medicine Show, and had a lot of choreography set to the lyrics, but wanted a few alterations made:

• Remove the instrumental break
• Shorten the intro slightly
• Shorten the outro, but keep the ending riff

All of these were simple requests, and after hearing the song I figured this would be a fairly easy job. Here’s how I went about it.

Pre-work listening

I listened to the track a couple of times, noting sonic characteristics that would be important when making the edits.

• How much does the tempo change over the length of the song?
• How does the instrumentation change between verses and choruses
• Where are the obvious cut-points? Are there any gotchas?

Basically, I’m looking for anything that could ruin the edits that I was planning. In this case, the harmonica was in the foreground near the edit points, so I knew I would have to listen carefully to make sure I didn’t cut off any notes in mid-blow.

Project Setup

Though I could have easily done these edits in a WAV-file editor, I decided to work in Pro Tools, since I’m very familiar with editing in PT, and I already had it open while working on another project.

I created a new PT project with the following settings:

• Bit depth: 24-bit
• Sample rate: 44.1kHz

After loading the new project, I used the Import Audio dialog to import the MP3 I was given by the dance troupe.

I listened to the whole track, making sure to set a Marker at every major song section. It is important to put the markers exactly on the downbeats, which will save me lots of time in the future when making the actual edits.

The first edit – remove the instrumental break

The first edit I did was to remove the instrumental break. Rather than have the instrumental break, the troupe wanted to go directly into the next verse after the chorus, and also wanted to remove 2 bars of the standard pre-verse break after the chorus to go better with the choreography they were planning.

I usually find edits work best when they occur on beats. Be extra careful if either segment you’re editing together contains a legato foreground instrument – it will make the edit very noticeable if a sound suddenly appears or disappears.

Additionally, I often like to edit on a secondary beat, especially when dealing with acoustic music. The reason is because you can often find very good edit points on the pickups to the down beat. Due to the phrasing of most music, you’ll find sparser instrumentation at the end of a phrase. Of course, it all depends on the specifics of the song you’re editing.

When I find the edit points I want, I slightly reduce the bounds of my selection before removing the middle. With Pro Tools, you can always adjust the edit point after the fact, so right now our only concern is to make the beats of each section line up so that the pulse of the music is steady through the edit. The reduced bounds will give me a visual indication I can use to help align the beats of the segments.

Now listen to your new edit (no crossfades are applied yet). If you sense that the beat is slightly off, make sure the adjust it now before going on.

Here’s the edit, before adding crossfades:
Inst-edit-nofade by chancesend

With your edit in place, you can turn the cut into a crossfade. I like to start with a crossfade of 40-60ms, making sure the fade is set to Equal Power mode (this will make sure the audio is at a constant volume through the edit). Depending on the kind of music, you will need to adjust the crossfade length. For faster or more rhythmic songs, I use a smaller crossfade. For more melodic or slower songs, I use a longer crossfade.

The placement of the crossfade is also key. I usually place my crossfade just before the beat, so that we avoid flamming the drums. Again, adjust depending on the song.

Here’s the edit with the crossfade:
Inst-edit-wfade by chancesend

The intro and outro edits

The intro and outro edits went through roughly the same process as the instrumental edit. Though here it was vitally important to make sure the lead instruments “made sense” through the edit.

The intro edit without the fade:
Intro-edit-nofade by chancesend

The intro edit after crossfading:
Intro-edit-wfade by chancesend

The outro edit without the fade:
Outro-nofade by chancesend

The outro edit after crossfading:
Outro-wfade by chancesend

Hopefully, you should notice that the edits without the fades should sound pretty good – the crossfades should only be hiding the instantaneous discontinuity, not masking the sonic differences between the two sections.

Bouncing down

Once I finished the edits, I bounced down the result to WAV. Note that I didn’t add a fade in or a fade out to the track – they are not needed since we were already working with a final mix that presumably had fade ins and outs.

I then used RazorLAME to create a 256kbit MP3 file

Delivery to the dance troupe

Once I had the final MP3 edit, I posted the audio to SoundCloud. I marked it as Private and listed the email addresses of the dance troupe members so they could listen to the track online.

Advanced edits

There are several advanced edits when standard crossfades won’t cut it. I won’t go into too much detail, with the hope that you will explore their use yourself.

Extended crossfades

Extended crossfades are crossfades that last more than ~1 second, and work wonders for non-rhythmic sections such as synth pads. In these scenarios, you need to make them long enough so that the crossfade sounds like it occurs naturally in the song. In some cases, I have used crossfades that even extend 20 seconds or more. It’s very important you use Equal Power crossfades here, so that you don’t produce a dip in the volume of the track.

Extended crossfades can also work well in rhythmic sections, but you have to be extra-careful to match the beats properly so that you don’t hear any flamming. This is equivalent to beat-mixing when DJing, but done in an offline fashion.

Unmatched fade curves

Unmatched fade curves are sometimes necessary for edits, when you want a beat to enter at full-volume, but have the pre-edit material continue to fade out (for instance, shortening a non-rhythmic intro).

Conclusion

With just a little bit of effort, you can create professional-sounding fades that most people won’t be able to notice. At least, if they’re not looking for it…

After having gone through a few months of writing songs with Emily Zisman, we have had our share of inspired and uninspired production sessions.

When writing Whoring For Hanukkah, we found the songwriting came incredibly easy. I think this was due to a few factors.

A new process

WFH was the first song that we co-wrote together (previous collaborations have been producing one of our own individual songs). Getting out of our respective ruts proved to be very beneficial, as we could bounce ideas off each other and receive direct feedback on these ideas instantaneously. This pair process took the song in a very different direction than either of us would probably have written it.

In the moment, it is very difficult to separate yourself from a lyric you just came up with. But this separation must occur if you are to receive feedback without taking things personally. In the end, I think we were able to avoid several lyrical pitfalls by simply being free to reject an idea as long as we could give a reason.

A focused goal

By simply focusing ourselves on a specific goal (in this case, it was to write a funny holiday song), this limitation actually expanded our creativity. We were required to think within these narrow confines, looking for potential story avenues.

A focused style

Because we needed to write and produce WFH very quickly, we had to focus the production. So we decided to write in a gypsy style, which Emily could emulate quite well in her singing style and I had previous experience on violin. In fact, it was only later on in post-production that we decided to bring in anything else other than a tamborine. This genre limitation further limited our scope, allowing us to spend all of our creative energy on the lyrics.

A great concept

One of the very first things we came up with was the title “Whoring For Hanukkah”. This really helped us with the whole song, as the title gave us the exact framework that we needed to write for. The concept lends itself to an outline quite well:

Woman loses her job, has to make money to buy presents, decides to become an amateur prostitute, and starts to enjoy it.

From that, it was fairly easy to figure out how to progress the story in the verses and bridge. The time was mainly spent coming up with a few lyrical gags and rhymes to tie everything together.

A deadline

The power of pressure played a large part on the end-result of the song. I’m sure that, given another couple of weeks, we could have fleshed out some of the lyrics and music better. But we were operating on the 80/20 rule – 80% of the song is written in 20% of the time. For this project, getting a song written at an 80% level was good-enough for us. If you believe the metaphor, than this decision cut our production time to just 20%!

Luck

Though I would like to think that luck isn’t a part of it, I need to be realistic and say that neither of us are songwriting professionals. As such, we’re going to operate less efficiently than a well-tuned songwriting team that has been going on for years or decades. Hopefully luck will play less of a role the longer we collaborate.

So here we are writing for upcoming songs like Peculiar and December. Though we are still working well as a songwriting team, it isn’t going as smoothly as with WFH. Why might this be? Certainly, the concepts of the songs haven’t been as strong as WFH. And we haven’t set any deadlines for completing the lyrics. And we didn’t limit our genre to anything. As a result, our creative energies are divided up between several different tasks, and the songs haven’t “gelled” yet. I don’t want to say we have writers’ block, but we need to practice and exercise our co-writing process a lot more.

Chris Bolton adds his ideas for overcoming writers’ block in this CD Baby post.

As a solo hobby artist who does more studio work than live work, I constantly struggle to get new listeners to hear my music. The obvious hope is that by exposing as many people as possible to my songs, a few of them might purchase something, and a few of THOSE people might recommend me to someone else. Building that promotional web is hugely important in exponentially increasing the reach of your music.

Artist Josh Rosenthal explains his own take on this, and other grassroots marketing techniques in action, in a podcast he recently did with CD Baby.

Listen to the podcast here.